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by besselfcn



Series: darkrooms [3]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Oral Sex, RDR2 Chapter 6, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:47:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27290689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: There have been men before Arthur; he has told Arthur as much. He very much doubts whether there will be men quite like him after — for either Albert himself or for the great and hungry world.
Relationships: Albert Mason/Arthur Morgan
Series: darkrooms [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1690516
Comments: 11
Kudos: 55





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**Author's Note:**

  * For [Juliet_the_Infinite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juliet_the_Infinite/gifts).



> These two... these two. Thanks to sairen for asking for this fic; I am falling back in love with them against my own best interest

There are only a handful of people in the world Albert expects to be knocking on his door at this late an hour, and all of them carry guns.

Given that, he brings with him to the door a letter-opener he has laid on his working desk. Not that, he knows, a letter opener will particularly help in a firefight if it comes to that, but at least he shall be an interesting obituary — _Albert Mason, knife-wielding photographer_ rather than _Albert Mason, shot dead unawares in his long johns_.

He cracks the door open, enough to see out, and —

“Mr. Morgan,” he says, with all the worry in his stomach sublimating into joy — and then, as the man sways in his entryway and slurs _can I — I’m sorry, I —_ sluices back to its original form.

“Come in, come in,” he ushers, shutting and locking the door behind Arthur. He scans the man up and down rapidly — no torn clothing, no obvious gushing wounds. The better for it; he doesn’t know what he’d have done if he had to play makeshift battle nurse. But Arthur certainly _looks_ wounded, the way he stumbles, the way red streaks the backs of his hands and the edges of his mouth.

Arthur leans a hand against the wall and breathes. Oh, the way he breathes. “”M sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know where to go.”

There are a great many things Albert thinks of saying.

Instead, he says, “If you require a washroom, it’s through that door there.”

Arthur nods as if in a trance. While he is taking care of himself, over the sounds of water splashing and barely concealed shuddering coughs, Albert finds and lights a candle to stave off the night a little longer.

He sits at the edge of the bed until Arthur leaves the washroom; he is shaking and sallow-faced and looks as though, at any moment, the last remnants of surety that he carries on him might flake off and wash down the sink as well.

“I need,” Arthur says, but he doesn’t know how to finish the phrase. He so rarely ever does.

Albert wonders for not the first time what circumstances brought up this man so that to ask for things he wants and needs is an incomprehensible strain.

“Lay back,” Albert commands him. “Lay back, go on. Don’t let your mind get the better of you, Arthur.”

Arthur exhales, this wet and awful thing, and Albert goes to his knees for him.

He does everything he can with care; removes the gun belt and holsters with trepidation still although Arthur has assured him many times before that they are not like to go off without considerable effort. Removes Arthur’s trousers with just as much care; this is considerably more dangerous an activity.

The knees of his khaki trousers are caked in what can only be the red-brown dirt that paves St. Denis. When Albert surreptitiously turns his hands over in the guise of repositioning himself, he sees the scrapes across Arthur’s palms.

_I need, I need._ Albert very much doubts he has everything that Arthur needs.

He does what he can, however — he removes Arthur’s underclothes and runs his hands up thick muscled legs covered in a fine coat of hair. Arthur is not yet hard, his head too far away, his mind twisting in that way Albert has begun to get used to; so he presses a kiss open-mouthed to the joint of his thigh and his hip, scraping teeth over the skin, and listens in satisfaction as Arthur groans.

He works at him with his mouth, his hands sliding occasionally under the thighs, sometimes up to press fingers into the impossibly taut skin stretched over abdominal muscle and scar tissue. There have been men before Arthur; he has told Arthur as much. He very much doubts whether there will be men quite like him after — for either Albert himself or for the great and hungry world.

He swallows Arthur down in one practiced motion; Arthur’s legs draw him inward, deeper, deeper.

As he moves and rasps his tongue on Arthur’s cock, he hears the hitching sounds of his breath as Arthur draws closer and closer to release; he hears as well the sounds of wheezing that lay underneath the breath, the way his inhales sound rough and forced as his exhales are punched-out and shaky.

When he comes, he grasps at Albert’s hair so hard it’s as if he’s ripping strands away; Albert leans into it; he lets him; he feels Arthur’s body shake apart with a horrible sort of finality.

Albert withdraws and himself makes use of the washroom now.

He carefully does not glance at Arthur in the next room over as the man puts himself back together.

Instead he returns to the bed and sits beside him as Arthur wheezes. Leaning over, Albert cracks a window despite the cold and lights a cigarette, and takes long and deep drags of the ash and smoke. He’s taken it up in the last few months; he pretends not to know why. It tastes much like the city looks, each time he tries to photograph it: dead and artificial.

Arthur looks at the ceiling. It is a dull and irritating yellow.

He says, “I’m dying, Albert.”

Albert does not have a name for the emotion that spills through his stomach so thick that he can taste it on his tongue, but it is similar to this:

Once, when he was a boy, before he lived in the thickets of a modern American city, he lived in a farming community somewhere west of Strawberry where the first freeze was a local day of mourning. In his childhood there was a year where, for a week in the middle of October, the frost had all melted and the temperatures climbed again, so hot and thick that he hadn’t needed to wear a jacket for days on end. His mother had warned him, at the time, that this was an _Indian summer_ — a falsity, a fake. A sense of warmth that exists only to be cut off by a bitter and even deeper cold. And he had believed her; at least, in mind, but not in spirit. So that when the frost did return again, with temperatures dropping into the negatives, it stung into his bones, a worse betrayal than if it had never left at all.

“I had gathered as much, Mr. Morgan,” Albert says, fingers threaded through Arthur’s sweat-soaked hair, and he feels Arthur crumble beneath his hand.

Arthur tells him everything, then.

Well — likely not everything. All the things he thinks Albert ought to hear, at the very least. Dutch Van der Linde, and the men he carries with him. The sun-bright glory of days gone by; of robbing and killing with no regard for fellow man. The thrill it had brought him and the fear it had carried, always running like that, always thinking if they just went further west it would all work out alright in the end. Always ending up, somehow, further east, until they found themselves now in fragments, waiting out the end.

All the things he thinks Albert will hate about him, if given the chance.

“Thing is,” Arthur rasps, with Albert’s arms draped over him, fingers running up the length of his side, “I think he knew what it was he was doing. That man I got it from in the end. Think he knew — think he knew I deserved it.”

This, finally, is where Albert grows weary of the self-flagellations of Arthur Morgan.

“I don’t think you _deserved_ to suffer any of what you’ve just described to me,” he says, and does his best to put on as little room for argument as he can manage.

Arthur scoffs. “Ain’t nobody put me up to it,” he says. “Just asked, and I’ve been more’n happy to do it all myself.”

Albert laughs and wishes he found it funny. “Who puts the wolf up to attacking a photographer startling them in their own home?” he asks. “Who puts the alligator up to defending the place it nests? Who puts, for that matter, the earth up to pulling a man down when he steps off the ledge of a cliff?” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe you appreciate how large the machinations of our modern day are, Mr. Morgan. And how very small you and I appear to be.”

Arthur fixes him with a funny look, then. Some sort of recognition — like when Albert spies a piece of art and recognizes in it the artist.

“You sound a bit like him, you know,” Arthur mumbles. “If he weren’t…”

He does not finish the sentence, nor identify the man.

Albert does not think he wants him to.

Instead, Albert stands abruptly, leaving Arthur with brow furrowed and mouth contorted lying on the bed. He shuffles around in his bag for his materials — pulls out the camera, and the associated flash, fumbling to put them both together before he’s got to light another candle just to assemble the damn thing.

“You want a photograph _now_?” Arthur snaps, with almost real anger in his voice. “You don’t — Albert, c’mon. You don’t wanna remember me all like this.”

Albert fixes him then with a glare that he hopes _does_ show real anger — the fury that hides underneath his chest, reserved usually for poachers and other men seeking to destroy wild and natural beauty.

“Arthur,” he says, slowly, deliberately. “Do not tell me what it is that I will want to remember.”

Arthur stares at him, then. Maybe sees him fully for the first time in this endeavor.

Then the flash blots outs his gaze, and suspends him in the burnt plastic light of the negative film.


End file.
